Overview
This document quantifies the number of LMI households by utility zone in select states. We use state specific LMI definitions and overlay utility zones to estimate the LMI population covered. The goal of this work is to provide data driven insights when new markets are considered with LMI requirements.
Utility coverage is provided by either the HIFLD national level electric retail service territories or, preferably, state sources that are more granular. Note HIFLD often provides overlapping areas (ex: a municipal boundary and an utility provider) so data should primarily be sourced from state sources or be validated from HIFLD.
New Mexico
Solstice operates in the following three utility zones in New Mexico:
- Public Service Company of New Mexico
- Excel
- El Paso Electric
LMI Qualifications
New Mexico LMI Qualification methods are detailed in the policy matrix, but in summary include:
- Medicaid
- SNAP
- LIHEAP
- First-time home owner programs
- Affordable housing facilities
- HUD data: https://resources.hud.gov/#layers-menu
- state specific to supplement: https://housingnm.org/find-housing/rentals/affordable
- Low-income housing
- State and federal income tax credit
- Entire multi-family housing project may qualify if the entire load can be proved to be low-income subscribers, with consent of all tenants of record.
- LMI - 80% of AMI
Census data is available for the population receiving Medicaid, SNAP, and number of households at or below 80% AMI. The following analysis quantifies the total eligible LMI population by each of these three categories.
Low Income Housing
To estimate the total number of New Mexicans low income housing, we first require a list of eligible propeorties. We take each affordable rental property listed on the MFA Housing New Mexico website. After geocoding each point, we have several options for determining the population concentration around each point. A commoon technique in transportation modeling is applying an isocrhone, or a travel time map. In our case, we want to see how many eligible population of SNAP, Medicaid and 80% AMI households are within a 15 and 30 minute driving radius around each point.
## Reading layer `nm_public_housing' from data source
## `/Users/jacobford/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-jake@solstice.us/Shared drives/Product | Jake/Geocoding/Qualified LMI by Utility Zones/lmi_by_utility/nm_public_housing.shp'
## using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
## Simple feature collection with 226 features and 6 fields
## Geometry type: POINT
## Dimension: XY
## Bounding box: xmin: -108.8368 ymin: 31.79585 xmax: -103.048 ymax: 36.91717
## Geodetic CRS: NAD83## Reading layer `nm_public_housing_isos_15' from data source
## `/Users/jacobford/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-jake@solstice.us/Shared drives/Product | Jake/Geocoding/Qualified LMI by Utility Zones/lmi_by_utility/nm_public_housing_isos_15.shp'
## using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
## Simple feature collection with 226 features and 2 fields
## Geometry type: POLYGON
## Dimension: XY
## Bounding box: xmin: -109.0198 ymin: 31.73925 xmax: -102.855 ymax: 36.98399
## Geodetic CRS: WGS 84## Reading layer `nm_public_housing_isos_30' from data source
## `/Users/jacobford/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-jake@solstice.us/Shared drives/Product | Jake/Geocoding/Qualified LMI by Utility Zones/lmi_by_utility/nm_public_housing_isos_30.shp'
## using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
## Simple feature collection with 226 features and 2 fields
## Geometry type: POLYGON
## Dimension: XY
## Bounding box: xmin: -109.2689 ymin: 31.5542 xmax: -102.6379 ymax: 37.19991
## Geodetic CRS: WGS 84